>This July, at a forward operating base in Afghanistan's Paktika province, I dropped my Kindle. Soldiers say that no plan survives its first contact with the enemy, and now I know that a Kindle-based travel library is unlikely to survive its first contact with concrete.

In the wake of this fiasco, I have become reacquainted with the libraries of leisure reading with which the military equips it deployed soldiers. Most military bases, even very small ones in remote valleys that are attacked daily by the Taliban, have what is known as an MWR: a morale, welfare, and recreation center.

Sometimes the MWR contains a pool table or a popcorn machine; almost always it contains a bank of computers and a shelf or two of books. Who selects these books I do not know, but I will go out on a limb and guess that it is not the soldiers who wind up reading them.

After painstaking browsing at a place called Camp Blessing, in Kunar province, I discovered three books that looked readable: a Tom Clancy novel, Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, and a battered copy of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities that I put back together with the green military version of duct tape.

These books were far outnumbered by titles that look like they came off the rack of bodice-rippers at the supermarket. I'd bet a lot of money that no soldier requested that Deborah MacGillivray's A Restless Knight, which sports a shirtless male model type on the cover, be flown here, and that no soldier will ever read it. I would guess that the obscure L. Ron Hubbard titles haven't gotten a lot of use either. So where do these books come from?

The answer, I suspect, is care packages. The yellow ribbon magnet on the SUV bumper is probably the most public way that Americans show their Support for Our Troops. Another, usually more useful one is care packages addressed to "Any soldier." (Web sites like AnySoldier.com and AdoptaPlatoon.org help people with the mechanics.) These packages are hit or miss.

Sometimes, a care package is perfect. Once -- I won't say where -- I watched a tentmate open up a box that contained a bottle of Skyy vodka, and the look on his face rivaled the boy's in A Christmas Story when he is finally united with his Red Ryder Carbine-Action Range Model Air Rifle. Of course, that came from a friend, not an anonymous patriot, but other, more licit luxuries can be just as welcome.

Why, though, would anyone send a big stack of AARP magazines to teenage and twenty-something soldiers in a war zone? Or a box full of Sensodyne prescription-strength toothpaste tubes? Or a powder blue "Hello Kitty" t-shirt? (All of these are things I've seen troops puzzle over in Iraq or Afghanistan. The lucky recipients of the AARP magazines were members of the 2-106 Cavalry Squadron last year in Helmand province.) Maybe not the same people who send those supermarket romances, but someone with a similarly well-calibrated sense of what deployed soldiers most miss.

Not that anyone is complaining. Take cookies. Truthfully, most soldiers have enough cookies. These days, between peanut butter ones, white chocolate and macadamia ones, regular chocolate chip ones, and the little bags of "Famous Amos Bite-Size Cookies," they make their way in bulk to even the most remote and embattled bases.

The outpost at the mouth of the Korengal valley, which is attacked with a wide assortment of weapons almost daily and rarely receives mail, nonetheless has more packages of peanut butter cookies than the soldiers of the 1-327 Infantry Battalion can make a dent in. But it's a rare soldier who, upon opening a package and finding a bag of squashed-up homemade cookies, wouldn't grin. That wouldn't be human.

It's not what's needed most, though. That place probably goes to dipping tobacco.

Skoal, Kodiak, Copenhagen -- there is plenty of it in the post exchanges on big airfields, and they even make round pouches designed specifically so you fasten your can of dip to your body armor. At the tip of the spear, though -- in the little patrol bases out in Taliban country -- a can of Skoal Wintergreen can be a precious commodity.

It didn't help that shipping tobacco to deployed addresses was briefly made illegal earlier this year, courtesy of an anti-trafficking law called the PACT Act, which took effect in June. (After an uproar last month, an exemption was written into the act.) This summer in Afghanistan, I heard a lot of complaints about the infamous "tactical directive" that restricts what targets troops can fire on -- but nowhere near as many as I heard about that law.

In a meeting for soldiers to get their frustrations off their chests at one outpost in July, infantrymen quizzed their commander for a while about the tactical directive and related life-and-death issues. Then they moved on to the scarcity of dip. "Can we get it shipped here through supply?" one sergeant asked. "It would be like Christmas every day."

"If they really want to support their troops," a soldier from the 1-502 Infantry Battalion told me last month in Kandahar's unpleasant Zhari district, "folks should quit it with all the other stuff and just send more dip."

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

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We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.